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Which Linux To Choose

Its been a problem for most of the Linux lovers and there have been many discussions on Linux distributions list. But each Linux Distributaries have there own usage and power with in them.Well this post discusses on which Linux to choose if you are going to use Linux or are Confused by wide variety of linux’s in the market.

So lets go,Here is the list of some Lines Distributions available Till yet,

Fedora

One of the best statistical sources regarding Linux usage are the Fedora statistics. There the number of downloaded images as well as the number of unique IPs getting software updates is counted. The data are difficult to interpret: no one knows if a downloaded image was only used to test the new system or to bun it onto a CD and distribute it to thousands of magazine readers or thousands of company computers. The second number is problematic because one new IP can mean a big NAT network or just a dial-in user who re-connected. So flaws everywhere, but it is a interesting coincidence that the IP numbers and the downloads are rather close.

There are also the smolt data. It tracks the users who opted in to a tracking system. Currently the smolt web server seems to be lacking behind. But there are current data available for older Fedora releases: these information's say that every month Fedora still gets more than 10k new Fedora 7 users – although there are already Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 available.

So the question is how to read all the data. One way was recently suggested by Paul Fields, Fedora’s project leader: he sums up the data to be around 11.5 million. Together with currently 2.5 million Red Hat subscriptions this would result in 13 million users. Focusing on Fedora alone and leaving the Fedora 6 users Fedora would still have a user base of 9.5 million users.

Desktop distributions

Well here is the next report presented by the Desktop Linux.You don't need to believe our numbers or surveys, though. Dell and Lenovo didn't invest in pre-loading Linux desktops to win points with the cool Linux kids. Both companies did it because they want to make money with the Linux desktop. Dell, in fact, has expanded its Ubuntu Linux offerings both in the U.S. with its 1420 laptop line, in Europe, and in the Chinese office desktop market. Today, Linux desktops are a business, not just a hobby.The leading Linux distribution is the Ubuntu family -- 30 percent of our survey respondents are using Ubuntu or one of its sister distributions: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu. While there are other distributions that owe a great deal to Ubuntu -- Linspire, Freespire, MEPIS, Linux Mint, and Pioneer all come quickly to mind -- we decided not to count them for Ubuntu this year, since some, like Freespire, have just made the switch, while others, such as MEPIS, are switching back to Debian, and Pioneer is going in its own direction. Which Linux distros do you use on your home or office desktop system(s)?

Next in popularity, after the ever-popular Ubuntu family, comes the SUSE Linux family with 21 percent. In our survey, we found mostly openSUSE users (19.7 percent) with a scattering of SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) users (1.3 percent).This isn't too surprising, since our preliminary analysis of our survey data showed that the majority of our respondents were individual rather than corporate users.

It's also noteworthy that the SUSE Linuxes have taken a major step forward. In 2006's survey, the SUSE family came in a distant second place with only 13 percent of the user base. In terms of year-over-year growth, openSUSE and SLED were the real winners, in fact, with a jump of 8 percentage points.

The Ubuntu family, by comparison, built on its lead by only 1.2 percent.

In third place this year we have "other Debian," which includes Debian and all of its relatives besides Ubuntu: Debian, Freespire, Linspire, Linux Mint, MEPIS, and Xandros. While this group, at 14.2 percent, may have dropped behind SUSE this year, if you add in Ubuntu -- the most popular Debian-based distribution of them all -- Debian once again dominates the desktop Linux landscape, accounting for near half -- 44.6 percent -- of this year's distribution votes.

The Red Hat/Fedora family -- which this year includes CentOS -- came in at the fourth spot with 9 percent. This represents a small loss from last year when Fedora had 7 percent, while Red Hat added in a mere 2.2 percent, for a total, including smaller Red Hat/Fedora-based distributions of less than 10 percent.

Finally, in our "top five," we have Gentoo, which also declined -- from 9.6 percent to 7 percent. After that we come to a group of smaller, independent distributions. Of these also-ran distributions Mandriva showed the best.

Perhaps the most surprising result of our survey was that PCLinuxOS showed so poorly. On DistroWatch, PCLinuxOS has been at the top of the site's page hit ranking for the last 30 days. Frankly, we're not sure why this popular, easy-to-use community distribution didn't do better. The site supporting it had recently had problems, but that problem's long been history. Perhaps, it's simply that unlike the other popular community distributions -- Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora -- PCLinuxOS doesn't have corporate backing. Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat all provide support and hardware partnerships for their community distributions that PCLinuxOS can't match.

Browsers

You can probably guess without even looking at our graph of the survey's results what the most popular Linux web browser is. If you guessed Firefox (aka Ice Weasel), you'd be right.Which web browsers do you frequently use on your Linux desktop(s)?

Linux users love their Firefox, with 60 percent of all users making it their web browser of choice. Trailing in the rear, you'll find KDE's Konqueror, with 14 percent, followed by what I find an interestingly strong performance by Opera, with 12 percent, and then the rest of the crew.

Conclusion

The following assumptions were made in creating the above charts from the raw data:

Running Windows Apps on the Linux Desktop -- this chart excludes "None -- I don't run Windows apps on Linux" responses, so the percentages shown are higher than those indicated on the raw data page.

Given that Fedora/Red Hat has roughly 10% and also roughly 10 million users together (which in fact seems like a at least slightly realistic data base, given the facts), the total number of Linux users world wide would sum up to 100 million Linux users. Nice.

That would leave Mac OS far behind, which is however not that surprising: Mac OS is hardly used in Offices or the government outside the US, and it is far easier to give Linux a try and keep it as a dual boot option besides a Windows installation. Also, the EU governments are pushing Linux quite a lot, and many companies and governments indeed switch to Linux right now or already switched over in the client space for some of the day-to-day workstations.

Still, last year I played the “numbers game” already (unfortunately with the same relativity source, btw.) and the result said something about 20 to 30 million users. I doubt that the number of Linux users spiked that much in the last year, but think that we can safely say the number of Linux users world wide is somewhere in the middle two digit million area, somewhere around 50 million installations worldwide.

Keep in mind that this counts mainly workstations – not traffic lights, shop information terminals or any other specialized hardware. Including all these devices would result in much, much larger numbers.